Marketing Helps Transform Potential Clients to Actual Clients

August 27, 2012

The primary purpose of the professional service marketing process is to identify and connect with potentially ideal clients. Once this connection has been established, we can start to build sustainable ongoing relationships with these people.

The early stages of relationships will help potential clients start to like us so that they might consider doing business with us. Our relationships with potential clients do more than simply allow us to demonstrate our personal likeability. It is through these relationships that potential clients can recognize our trustworthiness and competence, two other criteria for hiring service professionals.

After we and potential clients have agreed to work together, they become actual clients. At that point, trustworthiness replaces likeability as the leading personal trait.

Certainly it is still important for clients to like us. But once they hire us, they will start to trust us to help them. They also expect that we are competent, capable of delivering the services discussed and promised. And even though they may not understand the technical aspects of our professional competence, they trust us to apply our know-how, whatever that may be, to help them achieve their desired outcomes.